Pain Management Programme Day 9

My ninth day has been and gone at the Pain Management Programme.

You can catch upon my PMP Days here:- Pain Management Programme

Pain Management Programme Clinic

Today we went over the weekend’s progress and most of this I wrote about in my last update post.

We also did Deep Muscle at the end of the day and Visualisation, unfortunately by this point I fell asleep on and off in the latter, the speakers voice was just sooo relaxing.

However it was great to hear about everyone’s update, the things they managed to do, work on etc.  Everyone seemed to have made progress and had a really positive experience which was totally uplifting.  That is one of the things I am going to miss greatly is being with other people who ‘get it ‘ and with whom one can share experiences and get ‘real time’ feedback.

As well as going over the weekend, we touched again on our Values and Goals.  Mine have changed slightly from having been Independence to Living a full and happy life, the former of which just being a ‘part’ of the grand picture.  Independence as in being able to go out and get around on my own, without having to constantly rely on other people for most of it.

We then covered a lot of Mindfulness, about the hot cross bun of how thoughts trigger a mood, which can trigger pain, or pain can trigger thoughts which turn to mood, which can then lead to behaviour, vice versa it all goes back and forth.  With Mindfulness it is capturing and stopping at the thought process, saying a ‘hello’ and not letting the ‘thoughts’ affect one so drastically, that thoughts are just thoughts, not physical things upon oneself.  They are like minions tagging along for the ride made up of memories, fears and such like.

The other thing we did was exploring a physical object Mindfully, it is a hard thing to briefly explain in type, but covered in the Mindful book I mentioned in a post earlier, suffice to say apart from the experience of it, what it  does do it forces one to stop and ‘take some time’ for oneself in a way, which so many of us do not do, almost a breather.

Then there was the ‘bus journey’ not literal.  But thinking of the driver being us with our destination.  Driving along, focused then someone gets on the ride, it might be angry, or a fearful thought, more and more get on like this, then they start making noise, consuming one’s attention.  The driver ‘us’ might turn around to deal with one of them, what happens then?  We go off course and don’t get to our intended destination.  This is the same with thoughts how they distract and take us away form where we want to be and experience.

I have included below a poster on ‘Dealing with negative emotions’ for info.

Pain Management Programme Day 9

Here is a poster on Finding Alternative Thoughts, all part of the Mindfulness and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

Pain Management Programme Day 9

That is all for today, a fairly short one, until next time,  Justine xx

© Justine Nagaur